Truth, Beauty, and Goodness in Biblical Narratives: 395

A modern reader studying biblical narratives encounters various literary approaches and ways of understanding interpretive concepts. Hence an attempt to put forward a comprehensive hermeneutical model of reading biblical narratives. Such a model should aim at a synthesis of various approaches, and show how they are interrelated. The book proposes a hermeneutical theory which uses modern approaches to literary texts for the exegesis of biblical narratives. The book discusses three spheres of the reader's knowledge about reality: immanent, narrative, and transcendental. The move from immanent to transcendental knowledge through the mediation of narrative knowledge results from the mediatory role played by the biblical text, which refers the reader to a transcendent reality. This theory is then applied to the exegesis of Genesis 21:1-21, and involves the evaluation of the New Criticism, rhetorical criticism, structuralism and narrative analysis, reader-response criticism, the historical-critical method, as well as deconstruction. In order to satisfy the postulate of pluralism in interpretation, the hermeneutical theory draws upon a variety of ancient and modern sources such as Aristotle, T. S. Eliot, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Paul Ricoeur.

Krzysztof Sonek, École biblique et archéologique française, Jerusalem, Israel.

About Krzysztof Piotr Sonek